Broken Hopes
by NikoArtagnan
Summary: Sophie Bennett never had a chance for a happy ending. / Sequel to Broken Dreams


**Broken Hope**

Sophie Bennett never had a chance for a happy ending. / Sequel to Broken Dreams

* * *

_**WARNINGS: (READ THIS BEFORE YOU READ THE STORY!) THESE STORIES CONTAIN FOUL LANGUAGE, ANGST, ABUSE, VIOLENCE, TORTURE, SEMI-GRAPHIC MENTIONS OF SUICIDE, DEATH, INSANITY, RAPE AND OTHER HORRIFIC TOPICS. IF YOU CANNOT HANDLE IT, DO US ALL A FAVOR AND LEAVE.**_

These stories are NOT for the faint hearted. If you ignore these warnings, you do so at your own peril. I did not exaggerate ANY of the warnings. I can be very, very dark when I feel like it.

(Yeah I'm probably going to hell for this.)

* * *

Sophie is nineteen when she dies.

She is the same age her brother was when he died.

She will stare up at the moon – much as her brother did – and will see no point in going on, in the wreckage and ruin of what remains of her family.

She will stumble from the carnage, from the corpses of her mother and her murderer and collapse onto the snowy ground in her front yard. She will look up at the moon, shining bright over her head, and will know the sweet bitterness of relief. Sophie Bennett will know triumph, having dispatched the man who helped destroy her family.

The Guardians will have nothing to do with it. Sophie will get vengeance for her brother, who took his life almost a decade ago, and for her mother, who loses hers to a man to whom she gave only love, and she will do it without the help of a bunch of myths.

But she will lay there in the snow and long for a simpler time, when the love of her short life would take her on dizzying rides throughout a warren carved by the ancient touch of time and show her the intricacies of his art, cradling her in his gray-furred arms as he explained to her about the meaning of his markings. She will long for them, and for him and she will weep and wish he was there to be with her. Maybe if he was, she would not wish to die. Maybe she would fight then, against the long, slow, inexorable pull of death.

But he will never appear and she will breathe her last in the cold snow.

This is no faerie tale and no prince will ride by on a white horse to save this damsel-in-distress. There is no happy ending in this story.

Because Sophie Bennett will die.

And like her brother, Sophie Bennett will die alone.

* * *

_Sophie has never liked Trevor Armand. Even when he bought her all the ice-cream she could eat for her birthday and when he took her and Jamie and Momma to Disneyland because he was richer than Croesus (his words) she never likes him._

_He watches her with a really weird expression on his face. Whenever he gets that expression on his face he looks just like the crazy lady Miriam who lives in the shelter in town does whenever she sees something alcoholic. His eyes are wide and intense and they just stare and it's really, really creepy._

_But Jamie always puts himself in between the two of them and refuses to let Trevor come anywhere near her. He glares straight at Trevor and Sophie really doesn't like how his expression changes._

_He looks really scary._

_Jamie tells her later he will always protect her and she believes him._

_But who will protect Jamie? _

_The Guardians?_

_Sophie has not seen hide nor hair of any of them, even Bunny, who stopped coming to see her around the same time Jack stopped coming to see Jamie. Jamie tells her Jack will come back to him and Bunny will come back to her and she wants to believe him, but there's a desperation in Jamie's eyes that makes her think that her brother is lying to her._

_And to himself._

* * *

Everything aches.

The moon is bright and beautiful, but she can barely enjoy it, because she feels like she's been run over by a truck.

The cold numbs her wounds and she knows that's bad, but she just closes her eyes and waits for death.

The moon shines bright and beautiful and for the briefest of seconds she knows the warmth of fur surrounding her, a brash laugh tickling her ears, and the wondrous scent of wildly growing things.

Then it is gone and all she is, is a girl soaked in blood, slowly freezing. Slowly dying.

A gasp puffs into the cold night air.

* * *

_She will never forget the day she learns Jamie is dead._

_It is two days before she and her Mom are going to visit him. Sophie has been excited all week because she can't wait to see Jamie again. It's been a year since she got to see her big brother and it's going to be her twelfth birthday soon and there will be presents and cake and time with Jamie and that bastard hasn't even looked twice at her since she crushed laxatives into his morning coffee! Life can't get much better._

_Then her mother gets the call._

_Sophie is sitting at the kitchen table, eating some Cheerios as she doodles on her sketchbook. She's young, yes, but she's got talent and she loves to draw. When her mother isn't looking she works on her present for Jamie – a picture of him with Jack Frost. Jamie will love it. Sophie prefers the Easter Bunny, but hey, different strokes for different folks, right?_

_The phone rings and her mother answers it. But after a few moments of pleasantries, something in her mother's voice catches Sophie's attention and she turns just in time to see her mother's face go dead white. Her voice cracks and Sophie wonders what could have shocked her mother to this point._

_Mary Bennett hangs up the phone and presses her hands into the kitchen counter like it's the only thing keeping her upright. Sophie stares at her mother's back in no little confusion. Something like dread creeps up her spine._

_"Momma, what's wrong?"_

_Mary Bennett turns to her daughter and there are tears in her brown eyes._

_"Oh…Sophie, sweetie…" The woman sits down at the table next to her and Sophie feels that dread grow even deeper._

_"What's wrong?" Sophie demands._

_"It's…It's about Jamie, sweetheart."_

_The only reason the Bennett family will ever step foot in Shady Pines again is to collect Jamie's things._

_And his body._

* * *

Sophie staggers a little as she stumbles out the front door. It's a very cold night, the mid of December, but she doesn't care overmuch.

She's drenched in blood and her fingers are shaking and she just feels sort of dead inside.

Her feet thud down the steps with a mechanical precision and she missteps, slipping as she forgets how many stairs there are on the front porch and goes face-first into the snow-covered lawn. The sensation is similar to plunging one's face in a vat of ice water.

So she rolls onto her back, before the shock cuts through the numbness that has infected her very soul itself.

They're all gone.

A cracked giggle escapes her lips and she looks up at the moon with deadened eyes.

She is all alone now.

But, then again...

She's been alone ever since Jamie died.

* * *

_Sophie looks around the pristine white room with dulled eyes. This can't be her brother's room. Her brother is bright, beautiful, and full of fire. _

_This starched, sterile clean room can't be his._

_Jamie's room back home has – for fuck's sake – murals everywhere, of wild growth and fantastical scenes. Jamie had spent many a weekend putting the worlds of his mind onto the walls with wild abandon, roping her into creating the pictures with a sun-bright smile on his face._

_Painting always made Jamie happy._

_But this room is white. There are no windows. There is bed shoved against one corner, white as the rest of the room and neatly made. The only other furniture in the room is a bookshelf that is as white as the rest of the room, but it is here that Sophie finds the only color Jamie had these last couple of years._

_Several books, ranging from The Hobbit, to the entire Harry Potter series. A small glass figurine – a blue bird, fragile even to look at. A snow globe featuring the glorious New York Skyline._

_Then she finds his notebooks._

_She's grateful they hadn't taken that from him, at least._

_And when she opens the spiral-bound books she finds the heart of her brother's soul. Her brother had given her some of his notebooks, but not all._

_Pictures – and the sheer beauty of them steals the breath from her lungs – sprawl through the pages. Portraits of his fellow patients, landscapes both normal and fantastical. She laughs as she comes across a picture of herself, cheeks reddened. The Guardians are prominent in Jamie's drawings, and tears sting her eyes. It was only here that her brother could be happy._

_Then the pictures grow darker._

_She sees the things that haunted Jamie until the day he died. He gives graphic illustration to the shadows who watched him while he slept, to the nightmares that consumed him, and to the horror that his life had become before – and after – coming to Shady Pines._

_She remembers her mother talking about how this place would make Jamie better. How Trevor was so good to them both._

_How Jamie was crazy. How she shouldn't be like him._

_And fury ignites in her stomach. Red and raw and it consumes her flesh, boils through her veins and she feels blessedly warm again._

_She closes the notebooks, packs them away into the cardboard box, along with all of his other things._

_And as she walks out, she places a hand on the wall._

_"I'll get justice for you, Jamie."_

_Because if she doesn't, who else will?_

* * *

He fights back, of course. Like any dying animal, he fights back. All creatures have that instinctual self-preservation in their veins.

(How diluted it has become since the days of being the hunted, not the hunter, is another story).

Sophie ignores the pain, the blood running from wounds he frantically gives her flesh, and smiles at him.

"You and I aren't so different, Trevor Armand."

She remembers sleepless nights, the years of frustration, trying to bring down the institution that took Jamie's life and so many others. She remembers the years she spent trying to get justice for her brother, who wasn't fucking crazy, who'd been made that way by people who refused to see the monster hiding in their well-polished, suburbanite mix.

"You wanted power. So you took it. I understand that, really, I do."

She remembers her brother's shadowed eyes, his arm across her shoulder as he struggled to protect her from the horrors of the world. She remembers hearing the grunts and groans and she remembers weeping in her bed because she was small and couldn't do anything to make it stop and whenever she told Mom it only got worse for Jamie.

"We have always been so utterly powerless. You were molested by your father, ignored by your mother, and you lost your beloved older sister when you were ten. I had to watch as my brother was driven out of his mind with grief and abuse, before being carted off to an insane asylum where he was abused even more. I had to watch as my friends abandoned me, as all of Burgess turned its back on the 'crazy Bennetts', and my family fractured straight in half."

She remembers the bitterness on the days she walks by Jamie's room and hears him sobbing for Jack. She remembers praying on her knees for hours as the moon shines serenely down upon the world, begging the Guardians to come and save them.

"Oh wait, I had it a lot worse than you ever did, you pathetic piece of shit. And I managed to get justice for my brother in the process. You say it was my fault that I landed you in jail? Yeah, it was. But if you'd have kept your paws off my family none of this would have ever happened. You say it's my fault you raped a little boy, abused him and threatened his sister? You say it's my fault you tortured the woman who stood by you until the goddamned end, until the proof was practically shoved in her face, until she died? No it isn't. It isn't my fault at all, you slimy bastard."

She kneels over him now, and smells death in the air and smiles.

"Because I have the power. I always have had the power. And you pissed off the wrong girl when you went after my family."

His screams sound like the sweetest music to her ears.

* * *

_Sophie Bennett loses hope when she is thirteen years old. Even though her brother always tried to make sure she believes in the Guardians, she just can't any more._

_It is a cold, stormy day, but the funeral parlor is hot and stuffy, and people steer clear of the sullen blonde girl dressed all in black, who stands beside the coffin and refuses to move._

_She can't stop looking at him. At that peacefully serene face. She runs her fingers over the cold, chemical filled skin re-made from the broken corpse that leapt that cold night._

_And warmth spills down her cheeks. She touches her ice-cold cheeks in bemusement, realizes that the warmth means tears. She had believed her tears spent long ago._

_Apparently not._

_She gently touches his forehead, nose, eyelids, lips, and hair. Very gently, like he once did when she had trouble sleeping at nights and his eyes weren't ringed by raccoon-like shadows._

_Something inside her breaks and her knees buckle and she clings for dear life to the side of the coffin, weeping openly now._

_"Jamie!" she cries helplessly "Jamie!"_

_There are no Guardians to comfort her. And she knows they aren't coming. That they will never come._

_Because, despite all that Jamie has told her, despite the vague memories that haunt her even now…_

_The Guardians don't exist._

_Instead of hope, vengeance burns in her heart._

_Sophie Bennett will never smile again._

* * *

Trevor Armand weighs 250 pounds, is at least 6 feet tall, and has a gun. Sophie Bennett is maybe 130 pounds soaking wet, barely reaches five feet, and is armed with a bloody butcher knife.

Trevor Armand goes down like a ton of bricks.

And Sophie screams, blood goes everywhere as she hacks into the flesh with all the finesse of an amateur butcher on steroids. Trevor screams too, but a wild, piercing howl of agony. He grabs at her hair, yanks, and throws her. She crashes into something breakable, feels it pierce her skin.

He pins her to the floor, laughs. His sour breath makes her scream and she gets her feet free. He tears at her, makes her bleed, laughing as she fights like something possessed. He stops laughing when she slams one booted foot directly into the crux of his legs. He howls, rolls away.

She grabs the butcher knife and leaps on him again with a laugh that no sane person could ever make.

"You took everything I'll kill you kill you deader than dead," she croons in his ear and she hates everything, because in this moment she understands why he did what he did. He is just a powerless fool, desperate to be bigger than everyone else. And so is she.

* * *

They tell her with insincere smiles that they have no idea what she's talking about. It's certainly not Shady Pines' fault that her brother took her life. But she badgers them. Badgers them until they are so sick of her that she can't even get within a foot of the institution. She goes to the police, begging them to arrest Trevor. But they don't believe her either.

She almost gives up then. Almost gives up. She is only sixteen. No one would blame her.

But then she finds the tapes.

_In his office, books fall off the shelf when she is cleaning. Behind it is a safe, open. There are a lot of DVDs inside. Curiosity prompt her to take a few, just to see what's on them._

_Trevor and her Mom are out, so it's safe to peek._

_But then she wishes she hadn't._

_God how she wishes she hadn't._

_Two figures, intimately intertwined. The sounds they make are obscene, as each wet slap reverberates throughout the room, pressing the smaller form's face deeper into the pillows._

_She can't tear her eyes away, shocked horror and vehement disgust burrowing through every vein._

_The smaller form is dragged upright by the bigger – by Trevor – and her eyes bulge almost out of their sockets as she sees the smaller form clearly. Shaggy brown hair, pale skin, tear-filled brown eyes._

_She'd known it had happened, hadn't she heard the noises before?_

_But, but, Christ above, it was one thing to know and something else entirely to be faced with iron-clad evidence._

_Jamie begins sobbing as Trevor thrusts into him and Sophie feels bile surge in her throat._

_She barely makes it to the bathroom before she is violently sick._

_She screams and screams and screams in rage, trying to drown out her brother's cries._

_"I'm sorry!" she howls, curling on her side in the bathroom. "Jamie, forgive me!"_

* * *

Sophie rears back, socks Trevor in the face with all the strength born of adrenaline, terror, and spitting rage. He goes flying back.

Sophie has long since learned you can't depend on anyone else to protect yourself, not in this world. Because this is a world that grinds up the unwary, chews them to sawdust and spits them out when it's through.

Sophie has been taking self-defense lessons ever since Trevor came into her room on her thirteenth birthday, on the day of her brother's funeral damn him, and tried to rip her innocence away from her. Like he'd done to Jamie.

The rage consumes everything in her vision and she leaps, a single movement that sends her and Trevor crashing to the ground and somehow the butcher knife that had been discarded on the floor, the one that took her mother's life in the most gruesome way, the one that made that corpse of that beautifully broken woman who only wanted love, is in her hands. She ignores the fact he has a gun, because it truly doesn't matter anymore.

Sophie Bennett has lost everything because this bastard has taken it from her. His were the hands that shoved her brother from the roof that cold December night and his were the hands that killed her mother.

Her mother had once told Sophie that they had Viking blood in their veins. The blood of the berserker, the wild, primal warrior who called upon the power of nature to aid them in battle.

She believes it now. She feels that power now. And she lets it free with no inhibitions.

* * *

_Yesterday she had no ammunition. Now she has plenty. And she will make them see, and she will make them all suffer._

_Even her mother, who still loves that bastard._

_(Jamie was not the first he's touched, she learns that as she forces herself to watch every single video. She watches them all and feels like she's dying on the inside)_

_She finds others to help her, people who've been hurt by or have had loved ones hurt by Shady Pines. She finds past employees who couldn't say anything about the abuse. Patients who've survived the hell they suffered._

_And she plans and she plots. She schemes and gathers her supporters. The amount of evidence she compiles is enormous. Pictures, video, transcripts, interviews. _

_Then she goes to war._

_The news go nationwide in under a week. The Chief of Police finds himself with more than enough evidence to put Trevor Armand away on several rape cases and two murders and has no option not to, because Sophie goes on the news and makes it impossible for anyone to deny the truth. The newspapers blare the scandalous headlines for all to see. Shady Pines gets hit with no less than sixteen different lawsuits._

_Sophie testifies at Trevor Armand's trial and he completely destroys any credibility people may have had in him when he screams filthy names at her. Calls her a whore, like her brother._

_They drag him away, screaming, while her mother stares frozen from her seat on the defendant's side of the courtroom._

_The jury takes only thirty minutes to deliberate._

_Guilty on all charges._

* * *

Sophie screams, a high-pitched, agonized sound that cuts through the silence permeating her home like a knife through butter. She screams and screams and screams and feels something breaking inside her, even as she falls to her knees in a pool of cool blood, the blood that surrounds a body lying naked on the living room floor.

The body is covered in wounds that are horrifying to see. Not an inch of skin is unmarked, from bruises, to thin slices, bleeding gouges, restraint marks covered in blood. A Glasgow smile stretches the woman's mouth from ear to ear, and where once her eyes shone are now only gaping, bloody holes. The blood that crusts the corpse's legs and the ruin at the crux of the woman's legs brings bile to Sophie's throat and she is violently sick.

"Sophie, Sophie, Sophie…" the voice is cold and chilling, with a hint of malicious glee. A form detaches itself from the shadows and fear spikes up her spine. Trevor Armand does not look as polished and sophisticated as he once did. His hair is unkempt and tangled, with a greasy shine. His face is unwashed, with a wild stubble growing on his chin. There are dark purple shadows under his eyes and he is painfully thin. There is a gun in his hand, a small black revolver.

He smiles at her, softly humming her name.

Anger spikes through her, with a potent undercurrent of fear.

"Why?" she hisses out.

"You and your family made me a pariah, Sophie, darling" the words are like poisoned barbs in her ears. "When you and this bitch got me arrested, it was all over for me."

"You deserved it," she rages, anger immense now, banked, but growing, like a demented rotten thing. Her anger was always near the surface these days. It was easy to use it to banish the fear.

"She screamed so beautifully," Trevor says. "She was as beautiful as her son was. As beautiful as you will be, Sophie darling." He walks closer to her, almost in range.

"I'll kill you first," she gasps out, and underneath the rage and disgust swims, strangely enough, relief.

It ends tonight.

And then she won't have to stagger through life, pretending to care.

Thank God.

* * *

_The news dies down surprisingly quickly. In fact, everything dies down quickly. The newspapers stop airing the news, so do the news stations. The reporters leave just as quickly, going after the tragedy (a horrendous school massacre in Utah) that has consumed the nation even more than her brother's tragic life had._

_The lawsuits are settled. The perpetrators jailed._

_It's strange and had she not accomplished her goals multiple times over, she would have been irked by it. Why have things been swept under the rug so easily?_

_The air tastes strange and foreign and there is something really, really off about it._

_But she is finished._

_She sits on her bed and breathes slowly for the first time in over a year. It is her eighteenth birthday._

_The moon shines through the window and she glares at it, but with no real heat._

_"Go to hell," she whispers to it. And her worries fade from her mind in the strange light._

* * *

She only has one semester left of school before she graduates and goes on to college. She has a scholarship for Stanford, halfway across the country. Full-ride.

(She knows Jamie would be disappointed if she just went to the local college, and God she's got to get away from Burgess. Away from the stares and whispers)

After she graduates, she's making a stop at Town Hall. And she's going to change her name.

The name Bennett is cursed. And she despises the name Sophie. It fits her like a ragged sweater two sizes too small.

Sophie Bennett is a sweet, adorable little girl with a missing tooth and an all-encompassing love for bunny rabbits.

And for Bunnymund.

The pain that strikes her at the thought of him is like acid and she prefers the numbness. She doesn't want to think about him.

So, instead, she thinks of names she might like.

But mostly she thinks of Jamie. His smile. His warmth. She can't help it. She misses him, and with her father dead, her mother in an alcoholic stupor most days, and the rest of their family treating them like pariahs, she longs for her brother.

Her court-ordered shrink says this isn't good for her. She should think of the good things in life. But she's so tired. And the world is all grey these days. The color left when her brother did.

She turns down the drive and walks up the porch stairs and…

Why is the door open?

* * *

_She sits at her brother's grave. It is a warm summer day, and Sophie is happier today than she has been for many years._

_His is a simple gravestone, made from a deep, smooth gray granite. His name (James McKnight Bennett) and his dates of birth and death are inscribed in plain script._

_His epitaph reads, quite simply, "He always believed"._

_It suited her brother._

_She hums a silly little song and works on her homework and tells Jamie about the events of the week. The good things. How well she's doing in class. How the animals at the local pound are doing._

_Not how Cupcake and his "friends" tried to come and apologize to her and she lost her temper._

_Not how her mother spent a good portion of the week drunk out of her wits, puking her guts up in the bathroom._

_She doesn't tell him about how she got in a fight with another girl at school, one who dared to call him a whore. She doesn't tell him that she taught that uppity little bitch how to respect the dead and managed to guilt-trip everyone into letting her get away with it with a slap on the wrist._

_Somehow, she thinks he wouldn't understand._

_Because Sophie's learned how to manipulate others. It makes her feels powerful, what with everyone watching her with pitying eyes and pats on the head._

_And she knows Jamie would never approve._

* * *

"Good job today," her manager says as she walks out the door. She ignores it, like she ignores most everything these days. She hears a sigh emanate from the older woman as she walks out.

She knows the other employees of the bookstore/coffeehouse don't like her. She knows they think she's an anti-social, crazy, snobbish little bitch with delusions of grandeur. They talk about her behind her back every chance they get.

She doesn't care, to be honest. She is a stellar worker, possessing an iron-clad work ethic.

(And they know better than to badmouth her brother now.)

She had gotten revenge on the people who had stolen everything from her. Who had taken her precious brother and broken him like a sheet of salt.

Shady Pines' is gone, buried in an avalanche of scandal and rumors. Her brother's doctor had taken his life when it had hit national news that he preferred young boys to his wife.

Trevor Armand is in jail for his crimes. A humorless smile turns her lips up at the thought of him in a max-security prison. She wonders with no little sadistic pleasure how the child rapist is being received by the other inmates.

The walk home takes about ten minutes, passing through town to get home. It is a dark and cold night and her breath fogs in the harsh December air. The lights and general cheery atmosphere of Burgess in December seem like an affront to her brother's memory. Christmas is in one week.

Today is the day her brother died.

She tries to find the anger that sustained her for so long, tries to use that anger to banish the wail that wants to rage up in her as she looks in a shop window selling electronics and sees her brother's smiling face there, like a shadow.

Then his face vanishes and all that remains is a tired young woman with ragged blonde hair and shadowed eyes.

And she continues on her way.

* * *

_Sophie knows the Guardians don't exist._

_She knows, because they never cared enough to save the boy and girl who believed in them last. No one can be so cruel as to leave them to suffer willingly._

_So the Guardians do not exist, cannot exist. It hurts too much to believe otherwise. Hell, it hurts too much to believe these days._

_Belief is for those who are innocent, those who look to the sky and see the stars and dream of what can be and what must exist beyond the frail imaging of human comprehension._

_She's too cynical for it._

_So she stops looking up at the moon on those cloudless nights. When winter comes she mocks the children who speak of Jack Frost and Santa Claus._

_These children don't deserve to feel the pain she knew (knows, always, always knows). This is what she tells herself, even as the sadistic pleasure wells up deep. Countless kids lose their faith years before they should have. There is no Tooth Fairy. There is no Sandman. Look at the world, the hatred, the burnings, the bigotry, the death._

_She shows them the world and forces them to grow up. She leaves a path of destroyed hope in her path. _

_And she tries not to laugh as she does._

* * *

Sophie Bennett is not a good person.

She's not a bad person either.

Just a lonely little girl who misses her big brother.


End file.
